March 13: Isaiah 48:8-11

Key Verse: Isaiah 48:10
See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.

Devotion:
One of the hardest things I had to cope with when reading the Old Testament as a young person was words like these where God was telling the people they had gone through hard times because He allowed it to happen! I used to think this was quite barbaric when I read it as a young person, but the longer I spent reading the bible and understanding God’s ways, the more I began to see a new side of these words!

God may well have allowed things to happen during those times, but He was doing so because of the hard hearts and stubbornness of the people! They went out of their way to do things contrary to what God was asking of them. They were doing things in spite of all the good God had showed them. If people were doing that to me, I would probably have exploded a long time before this point… yet God chose to stand by them and walk with them as they went through these tough times!

When we see some of the things which happen in our lives, do we ever look back and try to identify what we were doing during those times? I’m fairly sure we will find we were probably doing all manner of things which God was not looking forward to! I’m not saying God was choosing the fate of the people – they were sealing their own fates by exposing themselves to the world around them and God was trying, every step of the way, to remind them of the things He had asked of them in the beginning!

Points to Ponder:
Do you do things selfishly?

How often do you think of the people around you, including God?